Forty-nine years ago, on August 20, 1968, the Soviet Union sent in troops from the Warsaw Pact nations to crush rising anti-Soviet protests in Czechoslovakia, led by Czech leader Alexander Dubcek.
Mr. Dubcek called for greater political freedom, including more participation by non-communist parties, pushing for free market economic policies and greater freedom from Soviet domination in what came to be known as the “Prague Spring.”
On the night of August 20, more than 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops crossed into Czechoslovakia, headed for Prague. The Soviets occupied the country within just over a day, and within a week, nearly three-quarters of a million Soviet troops were in Czechoslovakia. Due to the brutality of force used by the Soviets, thousands of Czechs fled the country.
In Washington, Dr. Lev Dobriansky, chairman of the Captive Nations Committee and president of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, called on the United States to voice outrage at the United Nations and elsewhere, and to seek U.N. intervention in Czechoslovakia. A protest was held in Washington, organized by the local Czechoslovakian community; joining in were members of the Organization for the Defense of Four Freedoms for Ukraine.
Dr. Dobriansky said the “brute Russian invasion” of Czechoslovakia was conclusive proof of “the dire need for a major revamping of our policy toward the Soviet Union.” He added: “Where reason and documented arguments have failed to prevail, now harsh experience should guide us in eliminating the naiveté and confetti diplomacy pursued by the administration in this decade… both administrations in the 1960s have pursued a confetti diplomacy in regard to the main enemy, which can be accurately depicted as the international dimension of the credibility gap… the confetti has enshrouded the real enemy of Soviet Russian imperio-colonialism and its communist weapons which are dramatically at work today in Czechoslovakia.”
The World Conference of Ukrainian Students, in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General U Thant, called for an international response to the events in Czechoslovakia. “We have just witnessed the stamping out of human freedom in a small and defenseless country and seen its sovereignty trampled down by the Red Army.” The students urged the U.N. to unmask the “true nature of Moscow’s objectives” and demanded the immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops from Czechoslovakia.
Similar letters were sent from the Ukrainian Canadian Committee (now known as the Ukrainian Canadian Congress), and the World Congress of Free Ukrainians (now known as the Ukrainian World Congress).
The World Congress of Free Ukrainians commended U.N. delegations that condemned the Soviet aggression at the U.N. Security Council, and appealed to other countries to join forces in defending freedom “against Soviet Russian imperialism.”
The Soviet action in Czechoslovakia soured U.S-Soviet relations and shocked the West. Not since the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary had the Soviet government resorted to such force to bring one of its communist satellite states into line. As a result, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson abruptly canceled his scheduled October 1968 visit to the Soviet Union to discuss, among other topics, arms control.
Source: “Ukrainian reaction to invasion: shock, indignation and outrage,” The Ukrainian Weekly, August 31, 1968.